The brilliance of Simenon’s ‘romans durs’ suggests he should have been a Nobel contender

DESPITE HIS affair with the cabaret performer Josephine Baker, 1927 was a bad
year for Georges Simenon: he only managed to write one collection of short
­stories and 11 novels. The following year, having disentangled himself from
the dancer, he was motoring again, and put out 44 ­novels. By the time of
his death aged 86 in 1989, Simenon had produced about 185 novels. Include
short-story collections and memoirs, and the number of his books climbs to
more than 400. That is the Simenon problem: how serious, how good, can so
prolific a writer be?

And Simenon was desperate to be taken seriously. The creator of Inspector
Maigret discussed his writing ambitions in correspondence with André Gide
and inveighed against the Nobel prize committee for giving it to “that
asshole” Albert Camus instead of him in 1957.